Potato tomato gratin

 

We reach a sad point all too soon in Minnesota's short growing season, where the only tomatoes at the farmers market post-frost are best roasted. This dish makes good use of these tomatoes we bought at last week's market, where we saw snow flakes icing the mounds of purple kale. 

The regular Saturday markets are nearly over; this coming weekend is the last one for our usual farmers market. It's a bittersweet day where we thank the few remaining hardy souls for all the good food they've given us, wish them a good, relaxing winter, but also are secretly relieved that there will be no more produce to strain the bounds of our refrigerator, waiting to be turned into soups and sauces in the freezer.

This weekend we wrestled a new freezer into our basement to replace the one that took a dive last winter, to our deep chagrin. This one is a small upright, which is slightly less efficient use of overall freezer capacity because of the shelves, but makes the food so much more accessible and less of an Antarctic archeological dig to find the soup you're pretty sure was in there, maybe, still. 

 

Potato tomato gratin

Adapted from a Beth Dooley recipe in the Star Tribune Taste section.  Post-market season, some decent-looking hot house tomatoes would do; just make sure you get ones that look juicy, since that's key to this dish.

Ingredients

¼ cup olive oil, divided

1 large clove of garlic, finely chopped

Lemon zest, optional 

1½ pounds fresh potatoes, thinly sliced

1 pound tomatoes, sliced into ¼-inch rounds

Kosher salt and ground pepper

½ tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, divided

3 ounces soft goat cheese

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9- by 13-inch baking dish with some of the oil.

Put remaining oil in a small saucepan with chopped garlic and lemon zest and heat oil just until fragrant. Remove from heat and set aside.

Place potato and tomato slices in overlapping layers in the prepared baking dish, sprinkling with salt, pepper and thyme and drizzling with some of the garlic-infused olive oil as you build the layers. Reserve some of the oil and thyme leaves for a final garnish later on.

Cover with foil and bake for 40 minutes until potatoes are softened. Remove foil and dot with cheese. Drizzle with remaining olive oil and sprinkle on remaining thyme and some more pepper. Bake for 15 minutes until cheese is melting and starting to pick up a tinge of color.

Rating: The first time I made this, I made the recipe as written, and it was just fine, so if garlic isn't your thing, leave it out and it's still a nice enough dish. The second time, I added the garlic and heated the oil, and that made it into a quite lovely, repeatable dish. Both times I used lemon thyme, since I've got a pot on hand, now settled into the basement for what part of the winter it will survive. The lemon was a really nice touch, so if you're just using regular thyme leaves, I might consider adding some lemon zest to the oil at the beginning.